Human Chain
Search in google:
Seamus Heaney’s new collection elicits continuities and solidarities, between husband and wife, child and parent, then and now, inside an intently remembered present—the stepping stones of the day, the weight and heft of what is passed from hand to hand, lifted and lowered. Human Chain also broaches larger questions of transmission, of lifelines to the inherited past. There are newly minted versions of anonymous early Irish lyrics, poems that stand at the crossroads of oral and written, and other “hermit songs” that weigh equally in their balance the craft of scribe and the poet’s early calling as scholar. A remarkable sequence entitled “Route 101” plots the descent into the underworld in the Aeneid against single moments in the arc of a life, from a 1950s childhood to the birth of a first grandchild. Other poems display a Virgilian pietas for the dead—friends, neighbors, family—that is yet wholly and movingly vernacular.Human Chain also includes a poetic “herbal” adapted from the Breton poet Guillevic—lyrics as delicate as ferns, which puzzle briefly over the world of things and landscapes that exclude human speech, while affirming the interconnectedness of phenomena, as of a self-sufficiency in which we too are includedThe Barnes & Noble ReviewHeaney has always been the archaeologist and ethnologist of his own childhood, recognizing that the dialect and implements he grew up with, the old way of life led by Irish farmers, were all disappearing in his lifetime. Now seventy years old, and writing in the gathering shadow of mortality -- not long ago Heaney suffered a stroke, an event that appears in several poems -- his recollections of things past have become even more movingly elegiac.
"Had I not been awake" 3Album 4The Conway Stewart 8Uncoupled 9The Butts 11Chanson d'Aventure 13Miracle 16Human Chain 17A Mite-Box 18An Old Refrain 19The Wood Road 21The Baler 23Derry Derry Down 25Eelworks 27Slack 32A Herbal 35Canopy 45The Riverbank Field 47Route 110 49Death of a Painter 58Loughanure 59Wraiths 63Sweeney Out-takes 66Colum Cille Cecinit 69Hermit Songs 71"Lick the pencil" 78"The door was open and the house was dark" 81In the Attic 82A Kite for Aibhin 85
